The
Tao of the Morrighan
We
all have our own Holy Grail adventure. The path of a priest that
serves a goddess is by no means an easy one. Getting the calling is
only the first step. Those that would be priests or priestess are
built and strengthened by being brought to the point of near death or
suicide only to be brought back stronger and more powerful. She will
break you. It's like the martial artist who wants to learn to break
bricks. The first step is to shatter the bones in the hand which is
painful and takes time to heal. After it heals it is stronger and
able to go through the brick. So in the same manner, those that have
the calling to be a priest or priestess of a goddess who encompasses
death and war must also be broken. You must be broken and go through
a lot of pain and heartache in order to be rebuilt strong in all
areas of the mind, body and soul. The stronger you get, the harder
the tests get. You get to a point where you try to make a plea to the
goddess for help only to be greeted with any even harder lesson. It
is not that the Morrighan is unforgiving, cruel or heartless, it is
that she wants to strengthen her children as warriors of the mind,
body and soul. All in the order that the would be priest or priestess
is unshaken in any circumstance, be it physical attack, psychic
attack, negative entities, heartache, emotional turmoil, etc.
However, at the same time it would make the outsiders view of us look
like we are the ones who have become heartless, in truth it is the
very opposite. We feel the love of our goddess and it will engulf
our entire being and in turn will project outward into our aura. But
now we are in control of our emotions and actions so that they do not
control us we have control of ALL
of our being.
The
work and philosophies that I am to present to you, which is a
priesthood curriculum, comes
not just from academic and literature research but also from
magickal experience and experiments as well as the words and works
with the Morrighan herself. Once at a certain level, magick
becomes a science. Where you predict a certain outcome from a
ritual, test it and see if it works. However, what works for some may
not work for all. However still, it doesn't hurt for one to test it
out and see before completely dismissing it. As the great Buddhist
teacher Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote:
“ALWAYS
LISTEN WITH AN OPEN HEART AND OPEN MIND.
When we read or
listen to a teacher speak, if we agree with them then we nod our head
in agreeance and walk away. If we disagree with them then we shake
our head in disagreeance and again walk away. In both ways we walk
away and have not learned anything. So if we listen with an open
heart open, open mind we will stop and try to understand even if we
disagree because there must be some bit of truth or it wouldn't be
presented and if we agree, listen as though you are a new beginner
because you may just catch something new that you overlooked.”
My
work is not law but more
guidelines for the readers to experiment with. This is what got
'Myself' to where I am and what I am continuing to work with. However
every person I have offered this work to has felt it's benefits. I'm just sharing my own experience.
You
can read all the books in the world on the subject but until that
knowledge is tested, what do you really know about it? I'm not
speaking of the type of literary knowledge that you're tested on by
S.A.T.'s or exams to see how much you remember of another persons
writings but true wisdom. You can read up on sword fighting all you
want but until you've been in a real sword fight, you really know
nothing about it. So the question arises, how much information is
genuinely yours? Meaning it's not “borrowed information” you read
it or got it from someone else but YOU experienced it and it is now
YOUR wisdom, regardless if someone else wrote about it.
When
more people start to do this work and follow the philosophies, a
'tradition' will
begin to emerge. So in doing so, we start not an organization or
hierarchy but a 'Tradition' that
can be handed down to future generations and followers of The
Morrighan. Tradition is a very important thing when dealing with
spiritual practices. Mainly if a group consciousness is to form. An
egregore. This egregore eventually becomes the consciousness of the
Morrighan. It is not just something we experience individually
outside of ourselves but WE become the consciousness known as the
Morrighan. This is when the Microcosm and the Macrocosm merge
together. One unified consciousness that is not just focused on the
Morrighan but is actually part of the Morrighan. Each of us have a
self consciousness of uniqueness until working your consciousness to
become harmonious with the Morrighan and then you are able to see her
in a much more clear way. This is how the secret, ancient priesthoods
of olde operated and this how the coven I work with operates. So I am
just passing along what I have learned.
This
all starts with a deeper more mystical understanding of who the
Morrighan is as a deity. In this series we will be examining her both
as a Left Hand and Right Hand Path Goddess. I want to first state
that your author does not follow either but walks a fine line between
both. I am a Taoist at my foundation. The Morrighan herself is the
Tao by very nature. The
first passage of the Tao Te Ching states:
“ The
Tao that can be described
is
not the eternal Tao
The
name that can be spoken
is
not the eternal name
The
nameless is the boundary of
Heaven
and Earth.
The
Named is the mother of creation
Freed
from desire, you can see
the
hidden mystery.”
The
meaning being this, it is life's experiences and emotions that make
us who we are. The emotions you project are who you are, not your
name or title but the energy you project from yourself. How do you
know you're truly happy unless at one time you've been sad and
depressed? And when you are sad it is a guarantee that you will laugh
and be happy again or how do you know it is light outside unless
who've been in darkness? You can not be inside unless there is an
outside etc. What is it like to go to sleep and never wake up? Which
is death and to go even deeper what is like to wake after never
having been asleep? Which is birth. Upon the spoken name, we name
things in order to communicate with each other but names are just
nouns and sounds we make, it is not what they are. The world is not
names it is a series of emotions that we perceive to our
consciousness and interact with. You are as much of your environment
as it is you. If we all communicated telepathically we would have no
names which is why most deities and spirit guides show us images
instead of words. The moment things have names they become part of
this physical world.
To
expand on this, this is another reason why most of the Morrighan's
children are empaths. She communicates to us through emotions which
bring us to a deeper level with her. When you feel what seems like a
panic attack or a gripping of the heart or anxiety it is her telling
you to speak to her and to take moment and be in the here
and now, that is the case most
of the time.
In order to keep oneself balanced
one must identify with both a Masculine deity and a Feminine deity
equally. When the masculine and feminine are looked at from a energy
point of view it becomes more clear.
Masculine
is considered positive while feminine is considered negative. Now
negative is by no means meaning bad or evil but the flow of energy.
Positive energy flows outward while negative energy flows inward. Now
for a male this means your masculine energy flows outward and when
you are only dealing with the masculine and positive energy you will
often feel drained and worn out at the end of the day and tend to
forget things more often from constantly projecting out energy. This
is also why males love to work on things with their hands and be good
at math by projecting their energy.
For
females constantly working with negative energy, (the drawing in of
energy) this is why they may feel more emotional at times and seem to
bring up arguments from some time ago from holding in this energy and
not letting it flow out. This is also why women tend to be more
psychic than men and keep a better memory.
So
when one works with these energies equally you will be able to
constantly draw in energy and then release it and also have a fresh
new energy coming in and being released so it doesn't sit and get
stagnate or being projected without being replaced.
How
this relates to the Morrighan is, for a Goddess a lot of her aspects
are very masculine, such as her role as a War Goddess. The majority
of most other pantheons the role of War is normally given to a male
deity and usually associated with the masculine. With the Celtic
pantheon it is the Morrighan.
This
can symbolized many things but in this case it is balance. So with
the Tao, within every female presence a male occurs and in every
male the presence of female occurs. For how would you know you were
female if there were no males and the other way around.
The
Morrighan as a Left Hand Path or Right Hand Goddess? The
truth is she is both. Let us examine both sides. Again, from a Taoist
point of view you must experience one in order to understand the
other. We'll start with the R.H.P.
The
end result of the R.H.P.
Is complete oneness with the universe. It is also said it is to serve
the gods and worship them like kings and queens. The R.H.P.
Is associated with the white light energy and all that is good and
selflessness. It is a means to have compassion for your fellow man
and all sentient beings. However where there is light there will
always be a bit of darkness, for when one 'worships'
one
puts the universe (or gods) above the self and tends to forget that
they are already a part of it and automatically start to become
separated from it. The term 'worship'
usually
implies to serve, thus is the role of The Great Queen, the
translation of the name 'The Mor'rigan' which is why there is always
a 'The' in front of her name. As I stated in my last blog, her name
is a title. We serve queens as their disciples. I know there are a
few different translations of her name but for now we will focus on
'The Great Queen.' This is also another reason why one should not
address her as Anu until she gives you permission to. For example, it
would be rude and out of etiquette to go up to the queen of England
and greet her as Elizabeth, especially if you are one who honors her.
The
L.H.P. and
it's end result is to become separate from the universe and to become
your own god head. To become your own light in the darkness and to be
completely self sufficient. Now I want to start off saying that this
is NOT the
case with LaVey's Church of Satan, which is more of atheist form of
self worship. Not that there is anything wrong with that if that is
your path, it just doesn't happen to be mine. Now the very ideal of
the L.H.P. is
to become the same thing as your deity. Which you must go through
darkness and chaos in order to achieve this. Many of us who ventured
out to become witches, mystics and wizards had to start with Satanism
which was our break away from Christian
Programming
which every one of us in this society falls into weather we like it
or not but the deeper we get into our path the more we learn to
separate it from our daily pagan practice.
Now
on the surface the Morrighan does seem to appear as a L.H.P.
Goddess being her title as 'Dark Goddess' and 'Goddess of Death'
however to those that she has come to there is nothing dark about the
energy felt from her. That is of course unless you cross her. I will
speak briefly about her dark nature from my own experiences. She as
my mother has always acted very protective over me. For example,
there was one instance where I was in a very destructive relationship
and The Morrighan began to haunt the poor girl as a black shadow
scaring her away. It wasn't until I met a psychic woman who had also
seen the shadow figure following me that I confirmed it. It wasn't
long before the girl who I was dating told me she was seeing it more
often as our relationship got passed due of seperation. She showed me
one of the Morrighan pictures I have and said it resembled her and
pretty much scared her away. And there have been other times in which
she has told me to get what I need to out of a relationship and leave
them. Now being that I have took several Buddhist classes, mainly to
help develop my meditation skills, you can't help but also learn
compassion for your fellow beings from those practices. This of
course made things hard for me because if I didn't do it The
Morrighan would do it for me. I try to see the best in people and in
the world, I acknowledge that there is a dark side to everything but
I don't focus on it because then I would be in world full of anger
and confusion. However, in all cases when she has shown her dark side
in this manner I would find out later that it has always been a good
thing and for the best. As they say “mother knows best” and she
has always shown me that, even if I didn't agree with it at the time.
But don't get me wrong, I am no pacifist. It's just I am at a point
where I chose my battles I do not let the world or any one person do
it for me. I have not spent more than a decade learning the way of
the sword just to not be able to use it if need be.
So
with all that, that is just some of her dark nature that I myself
have witnessed. Back to the the mystical side of things, While
studying the Old Irish language I came across a word that had a big
significance within the Morrighan. Púca.
(pronounced: poo-ka) Which from older texts describes it as the
shadow side or shape-shifting of the personality, which can be a
dangerous aspect to become aware of at the wrong time. The Púca
is
itself a divine part of a person but also a terrifying aspect of a
divinity. It can be an alternate persona often used for magical or
martial purposes. It was equated as part of the individual soul in
Celtic lore. Modern texts have equated it with an actual creature
with the same attributes. They were known to shape-shift and were
much like the the Fae. They were bringers of either good or bad
fortune. But just like with Goetic Demons they are not only the
objectivity of the universe but are also part of the subjectivity of
the personality and of the soul. Which bring us back to the
Microcosm. That miniature self that represents the universe as an individual consciousness. It isn't until we connect with our Great
Mother or any deity for that matter that we begin to be a part of the
Macrocosm or for a better term
'become awaken to realize it'
So
the entire ideal of 'darkness' is more mundane then spiritual. Death
is a natural part of the universe as much as is the sun that brings
life to our planet. Most are afraid that consciousness will blink out
and we will be locked in some dark box forever. You can't have an experience of nothingness. Even after death nothing truly ceases to
exist. So after you die you'll have the same sort of experience as
when you were born. Man will always be driven by war and the will to
compete in order to be better. We all have different points of view
of things as we all start out as individuals and there for we as humans
will always have conflict of interests. But it's the abilty to accept
our differences that make us civilized and to be a greater individual
for the benefit the all. We have all seen life through different eyes
and our choices and experiences have shape who we are and how we
determine our judgements. A whole lot of people in the world are very
happy living their entire lives with just experiencing the universe
with the sensations that come through their five senses and what they
project. However when one is spiritual you move beyond all that. We
eventually realize that we are the Morrighan expressing herself
through us and our emotions. That is the collective whole of what
being a priest really is.
So I leave you with this: Not
even the gods can please everyone in the world, so why would you
think you could? Don't worry about pleasing the world because when you please yourself the world in itself will be pleased.
On a personal side note I
must mention, While I will continue to keep writing on this blog as
frequently as I can, this will be the last one that I advertise on
any of the social media sites. I'm not doing this for a popularity
contest nor do I care about having everyone know who I am. I like to
keep my magick life private. I am part of coven in which we utilize
the techniques I have and will be presenting. Our coven is devoted to
our great mother The Morrighan. We are structured in the ways of the
ancient priesthoods and practice in secret. We are by no means wiccan
which usually accompanies the term coven but we operate in a more
ceremonial magick fashion. While our name is out there, as we do a
lot of work for our local pagan community, we do not advertise or try
to recruit members but we can be found by those who seek hard enough.
We are very selective on who joins our coven and members have to have
had a calling from the Morrighan. The Morrighan has requested that I
put out this becon for myself and for the coven for those that seek
the knowledge.
